Dealing with the new cookie directive

A year after it was first announced and this weekend sees the deadline for businesses to implement the new law governing use of cookies on their websites. From Sunday onwards, all sites will be required to obtain informed consent from visitors before saving cookies onto a machine.

Just to refresh our memories, what exactly is a cookie? To put it simply, they’re pieces of personal data that are stored when users browse the internet. They’re often used for the sakes of remembering user names and passwords, targeted advertising or analytics and so on. The Information Commissioners Office (ICO) breaks them down into three categories;

Session Cookies

These are short term cookies, usually only lasting during a single browser setting, they might be used for example by an online bank, and then forgotten when the browser is closed and the session ended. These are deemed to be less intrusive as they are only stored for a short period.

Persistent Cookies

These last much longer, and are remembered between sessions. They might be used by a browser to remember login details for a website, or by marketers to make use of target advertising.

First &Third Party Cookies

First party cookies are set by a site being visited and usually relate to web analytics. Third party cookies are issued by a server different to the website currently being visited, for example it might be used in third party advertising to target advertise through banners or adspace on a site.

The new legislation is aimed at tackling privacy issues, which relate to the growing use of cookies by websites without the user realising it. As briefly summed up by our Technical Director last year when the legislation first came out;

• Tracking cookies need permission before they can be used. 
• Session cookies and “remember my login” cookies are okay. 
• So basically, consent is required when the cookie is not required for a service.

The ICO has been decidedly vague about how exactly businesses should go about informing their visitors about cookies. On the plus side, this means that businesses are free to analyse their site and look at how best to interpret the new regulations to suit their audience and website. However on the negative side, it also means that some businesses are throwing themselves into it in such a way that it might have a negative knock on effect.

Many sites still have yet to adopt the new ruling; even the government has admitted it won’t be up to speed by the time the deadline ticks over. Fortunately it seems the ICO has no plans to chase rogues straight away, instead they are hoping companies will become more focused finding the most suitable form of implementation.

We’re already helping our clients with work on meeting the new cookie legislation, so if it’s something your business is keen to look into, why not come in for a consultation or talk to our Sales Team about how we can help you out.


Author: Alice Cheetham

Geek Video of the Month

 It's early days yet, but last month, Google released this video of Project Glass, perhaps showing a taste of things to come?

Looking like they've come straight from a science fiction flick, the concept of these augmented reality specs show us a wire-framed glass with a small display over the right eye. Also included is a camera, microphone, GPS and one would assume a wireless connector to make the whole thing work.

Project Glass emerged from the Google X Lab, responsible for other interesting technologies such as Google's self-driving car. Apparently, the glasses are rumoured to cost around the price of a top range smart-phone and hope to be out by the end of 2012.

Whilst I think the idea behind it is great, I'm not sure our current hardware is quite up to it! But fingers crossed!


Author: Alice Cheetham, Andy Clarke

Optimising landing pages

First impressions are important; as the quote goes “You never get a second chance to make a first impression”. The first impression a potential user has with your website could decide whether they stay and look around or dive straight for that backwards arrow on their browser window.

Your sites landing pages could be one of, if not the, most important page of your site. Here’s a few simple Do’s and Don’ts with the aim of helping lower bounce rates and up returning visitors.

 Do: 

Have a clear call to action:
The aim of a landing page is to clearly prompt towards a certain action or results. Whether it’s purchasing an item, registering or signing up for a newsletter or even simply encouraging visitors to explore your site more, it’s important to stay focused on that goal.

Your aim is to make the trip for your visitor as simple as possible, the easier or more enjoyable you make it for your customer to get to the end of their user journey through your site, the more likely they are to stick to it.

Use brand validation:
If you’ve got some big clients on your list, don’t be afraid to name drop and put their logos out there. Association can be a powerful tool and increase trust in a company, and as we mentioned when looking at site usability, trust can be a very important factor online.

Share!
Most people are familiar with social media, the likes of Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and such. Based from the common mantra that the easier something is to do, the more likely people are to do it, putting in social share icons will help spread your site around. Statistics dictates that more likely than not, the more visitors to your site then the more conversions you’ll make!

Optimise!
Keep coming back to your analytics and looking at your sales conversions, you might find that certain keywords are pulling in customers and others less so. Of course these can change constantly, so it’s important to keep doing it! After a while you’re sure to find the combinations that work best for your market, so keep reviewing.

Be design and user conscious: 
Of course, with scroll bars on windows, your site can technically be as ‘long’ as you want it, but resist the temptation to go crazy! It’s fairly well acknowledged that most people don’t pay much attention to content ‘below the fold’ (anything that users have to scroll down to view). So don’t hang around and get straight to the point at the top of your page.

Keeping basic aesthetics and consistency is important throughout your site. A design that looks cheap and obnoxious doesn’t help a company’s credibility, and a poorly built site will not encourage users to stay and look around.

Cater for different platforms:
Smart-phones are everywhere, and now tablets too! Of course this can depend on your target audience or what your aim is for your landing page, but with more and more people browsing through their mobile devices, it’s something many companies need to take into account. There are plenty of different approaches you can take with this; from responsive design to a completely optimised website, or even a mobile application.

Don’t: 

Go overboard:
Simple designs are best; furthermore make sure your page loads quickly. An image heavy landing page may look great on paper, but in practice anything that takes longer than a few seconds to load is going to lose visitors.

Whilst we’re on the topic of design, try and keep a smooth consistent flow from page to page on your site, whether its colour palette or visual elements, you don’t want to confuse your visitor by convincing them they’ve stumbled into something entirely new the moment they stray away from your landing page.

Make it too complex:
Depending on the aim of your landing page, you might have some kind of simple functionality on it, such as a form to sign up for a newsletter and so on. Keep it simple! The quicker and easier it is the better, let the user tab between fields, use check boxes rather then drop down menus and auto-populate where you can. Avoid asking for too much detail if you can, it might be a deal killer.

Misrepresent:
People love kittens (or puppies, if you prefer) but you don’t need one on your landing page (unless maybe you’re selling kittens? In which case I guess you could get away with it...), a bit of creativity isn’t a bad thing, but you don’t need to distract your customers from their goal.

Furthermore you certainly don’t want to give your user the wrong impression; nobody likes to waste their time. Try and avoid content on your page that doesn’t ultimately point towards the visitors intended destination.


Now of course there are plenty more odds and ends that you can incorporate when looking at optimising landing pages, this is just a quick overview. Even then some of these points may be more heavily weighted then others, depending on the aim of your particular landing pages. If you'd like to read more about optimising and usability from an e-commerce point of view, then take a look at last month's light hearted take on it.

If you're interested in learning more about how Rocktime can help you, from sites to search marketing or mobile to bespoke development then why not get in contact and drop our sales team a line.


Author: Alice Cheetham

Lets look at site usability

So you’ve had an amazing idea for a website that is going to make you richer than Del Boy.
You’ve found a website design agency who’ve produced a slick, modern looking site.
Your advertising campaign has gone live. Traffic is coming to the site.
Now it’s just case of waiting for those orders to flood in....

Nothing happens, or at least nothing on the scale you expected.

You know your figures stack up and on average you should be converting 1% of your visitors into sales but your site simply isn’t achieving that. Oops!

In my mind the main thing that has an adverse affect on site performance is usability. Let’s draw some comparisons between an e-commerce site that sells ‘widgets’ and a fictitious supermarket, for the sake of argument we’ll call them ‘Freshco’.

What’s the first thing you see?

“You notice how they always put the fruit and veg at the entrance to the supermarket? You go in thinking 'this is a fresh shop, everything in here is fresh! I will do well here.' You never go straight to the bit with the toilet paper and squeezy brushes do you? ”

Eddie Izzard – Definite Article

Eddie hits the nail on the head here, first impressions really count. Your site sells widgets and the first thing a user should see when they land on your page is a picture of a widget. It should also be a nice clear picture taken by a professional photographer, not something that you’ve snapped on your phone.
If you have an adwords campaign running you should make these first impressions more specific. If a user has searched for ‘Blue Small Widgets’ take him straight to the page that has the information about ‘Blue Small Widgets’, don’t just dump him on the home page and let him find his own way there.

What’s the lighting like?

When you walk into a Freshco it’s bright, almost as bright as the sun! Even in the middle of the night they keep the aisles well lit. As a result Freshco has an electricity bill roughly equivalent to the gross domestic product of Venezuela but they do this for a reason.

Imagine how much harder it would be to go shopping in the dark. All this light makes it easy to see things without having to strain your eyes and your website should be no different. I’m not suggesting that you make your design a white so bright that you could get a tan from looking at it but you should be able to read text easily and the images of products should look as crisp and well lit as possible. (Usually you’ll find manufactures are happy to supply you with good, isolated images of their products.)

Where’s the beef?

At Freshco the beef is in the beef section. The beef section is in the fresh meat aisle. The fresh meat aisle is in the refrigerated area of the store. Easy peasy lemon squeezy!

And that’s not only at Freshco. If you were to drop anyone (with the possible exception of vegans) into the middle of a modern day supermarket they should be able to find the beef easily. The same should be true of your widget store.

• Have a search box that can search product name, description and code easily. Stick it somewhere obvious near the top of every page.

• Navigation. Make it simple, straightforward and intuitive. Use both horizontal and vertical navigation if need be.

• Use a sensible hierarchy of products and categories.

• Make sure that there’s a ‘Basket’ and ‘Checkout’ link in an obvious place.

 Put the high profit items at the end of aisles.

Yes, that’s what they do at Freshco. Believe it or not they’re not putting the most useful value for money products at the ends of aisles, they’re putting the ones that have the higher profit margins there because most customers will pass by these area.

Ok, so an e-commerce site doesn’t have physical aisles but there are areas on the page that could be used to push high profit, or end of line products that relate to the rest of the page. If you’ve got 100 orange widgets that you want to get rid of, it doesn’t hurt to promote this fact on pages relating to red and yellow widgets.

Everybody hates forms!

Unless you’re applying for credit at Freshco you can take your shopping to the till, pop in your card, key in your pin and you’re good to go. You don’t have to become a member. You don’t have to give your address. You don’t have to give a daytime telephone number.

Granted there are certain pieces of information that are important, such as delivery address, but try to make this easy for the user. Don’t force users to register if they don’t have to. If possible and budget allows use a post code look up that pre-populates the address fields. You should definitely have the ‘Is the delivery address the same as your billing address?’ functionality. Keep the information that you ask for to a bare minimum. You can always have a text area that allows for any other comments should someone wish to explain the intricacies of catching the train from platform 9¾ at King’s Cross.

Don’t look shifty!
 
We all know and trust Freshco. Unless you’re lucky enough to have built a large household brand there’s a good chance that users won’t know exactly who they’re buying from the first time, and when it comes to money, people are careful. Having the logos of the cards that you accept will help a little but there’s much more you can do.

• Having a ‘Shop safely with us’ type page will allow you go in to detail about how you ensure that users details are safe and secure, link to this page from somewhere prominent either on every page, or at the very least from the basket page onwards.

• If you’re a limited company put the registered number in the footer of the layout. Widgets Ltd Registered in England and Wales No. 1234567 looks better than ‘Make all cheques payable to Dave T Geezer... discounts for cash!’

• Display a telephone number, even if it’s likely to go to answer phone.

• Put a physical address and not just a contact form on the site.

• Make sure the site looks good, works and that the copy is spelt correctly. A lack of attention to detail can result in a lack of trust.

Check your stats.

In Freshco, even the untrained amateur can spot the useless check out attendant from 30 yards away, you can see clearly if an item is out of stock or if the tills aren’t working. This is because everything is under one roof.
Your online shop is slightly different from this. Your customers are more than likely sat on a sofa wearing nothing but underwear and scratching themselves, with Hollyoaks on in the background. You don’t have the luxury of being able to watch their experience but your stats can give you an idea.

If, for example, there are thousands of users who get through to the final checkout page but don’t complete the transaction have a long hard look at that page to see if anything could be improved. If the bounce rate is through the roof, on a certain entry page, scrutinise that page, tweak it, and see if that makes a difference. If there’s fewer visitors than you would like hitting a particular page, than make it easier for them to get to, perhaps by placing it on the home page.

Your stats aren’t just a meaningless set of numbers to show the bank, they can help you get an idea of how to improve your users experience.

Make it as easy as you can for people to part with their hard earned cash!

This pretty much summarises it. The whole journey should be...
1.    Go to site
2.    Find Product
3.    Add To Basket
4.    Repeat if necessary
5.    Pay

Anything outside of that, any additional clicks or processes will slow people down and make it more likely for them to go elsewhere.

On a slightly more serious note, whilst talking about our hypothetical Freshco is one thing, putting all this into practice is quite another. Whether it's starting from scratch or improving for an already existing web development, why not get in contact with us here at Rocktime, and our Sales Team will be more than happy to talk strategy and solutions over tea and biscuits.


Author: Foz

Geek Video of the Month

Why go to the supermarket, when the supermarket can come to you? Check out this month's Geek Video for an innovative idea from big-name retail brand, Tesco.

Their Korean network of shops, Homeplus, ran this fantastic campaign using QR codes and mCommerce. As you can see in the video, the subway store allows commuters to do their shopping on the fly, with deliveries arranged in hours and minutes rather than days, so your shopping is on the way to your house, as you are!

From the looks of it, the idea was very well received, the return on investment is certainly more than tangible. At the time this campaign ran, in June of last year, new customer registrations for Home Plus increased by 79% and sales by 130% and Tesco Homeplus became the number 1 online and 2nd offline supermarket in Korea.


Author: Alice Cheetham

Google Venice update and Local Search

Here at Rocktime we do love Local, and usefully for us and our clients, Google loves Local too. The Google Venice update in February sees a few tweaks to search engine rankings which can be summed up in the following;

• Local results will be more heavily favoured in search rankings

• Local results will now be ranked higher for broad search terms

• Google now returns the searcher more relevant, specific, personalised results relating to the location.

Since the Panda update almost a year ago, there are three other significant Google updates worth being aware of;

In August 2011, Caffeine was initiated in order to create a faster, more accurate indexing and search system and to better handle rich media and real-time content.

November 2011 saw the release of Fresh which enhanced the importance of adding new fresh content to a web site and was largely about chronological order of content. Google Fresh acted to give more weight to websites producing new content than ones that haven’t produced a new page or post in years.

Most recently in January 2012, Google released Search plus Your World (SpYW), which you can read about on our own article about the SpYW launch. In brief this update increased the importance of social content in searches, as well as additionally prioritising Google’s own social network site, Google+, in search results.


Author: Alice Cheetham

2012 Social Media Startups

Hot on the coat tails of social media’s current love affair with Pinterest, come a handful of start ups that have all kicked off in 2012. Some less subtle then others! Let’s take a quick look at just a handful of them.

“Social Travel” has been growing in leaps and bounds. As everything seems to follow Pinterest in trending towards more visual approaches to content; we’re seeing a lot of similarly styled sites popping up.

Trippy recently redesigned its site to jump on the Pinterest bandwagon. Users can now create travel boards and can pin images to them, comment, and also choose to tag their images with “Want to go” or “been there”.

Though originally launched some 3 years ago, just earlier this month, the visual-travel-discovery site, Wanderfly, redesigned and re launched their site. Gtrot, another social travel site has also opted for a more visual focused design update, with similar photo uploading and recommendations.

Now moving away from travel and more to commerce, Fancy can be described as a Pinterest catering for ecommerce merchants, facilitating ecommerce in two ways;

• The majority of items pinned on Fancy come straight from ecommerce stores, so a ‘Buy it’ button takes users straight to the merchant's page

• Users can also purchase items directly from the Fancy site, involving merchants more directly in the process. This requires merchants to find items that users have fancied, when they find something that they stock the merchant can place a bid to sell that particular item, through Fancy, by using the ‘I want to sell it’ button.

Pingram.me sells itself as a mash up of Instagram and Pinterest, though you’d be hard pushed to tell the difference between it and the latter of those two at a glance. The major difference between the two is that pinning on Pingram is only enabled on photos taken by other Pingram users. This approach is intended to both respect Pinterest etiquette and protect other Instagram users from having their images shared unknowingly.

Now moving momentarily back to the world of Social Travel, but refreshingly un-Pinterest like, we have this new site, Tripbirds. Rather than relying on friends to create content, Tripbirds instead organises geotagged content from other friends on different platforms, which at the moment includes popular media such as Facebook, Foursquare and Instagram.

Mashable has kindly outlined ‘9 social networks to watch’; such as Path, Highlight, Sonar, Banjo, Glancee, Localmind, Forecast, Gogobot and Fancy which we mentioned above. All these social networks are trying to win an audience over from Facebook, yet trying not to become too similar to Facebook; which already offers some very similar features to these new start-ups and has the added bonus of being used by many of the businesses we work with and certainly all our friends.

Of course, whilst spreading your influence is important, getting on board every social media fad that pops up isn’t a constructive use of time and effort. If you’re interested in investing into social media and discovering where to focus your efforts, why not get in contact with Rocktime and talk to our Flashlight team about discovering a Social media strategy tailored for you.


Author: Alice Cheetham